


Echoes

by butabitchcanwrite



Category: L.A. Noire
Genre: Daily Drabble, F/M, Grief/Mourning, Heavy Angst, Implied/Referenced Character Death, Major game spoilers, One Shot, This fic was made to rip your heart out and I have no doubt it will succeed
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-09-11
Updated: 2016-09-11
Packaged: 2018-08-14 10:18:32
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,923
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8009815
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/butabitchcanwrite/pseuds/butabitchcanwrite
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>(Daily Drabble) She loved him. Even with only his memory and the picture on the mantle to remind her of the man she'd dedicated herself to, even after all the things he'd done and how distant he'd gotten, she loved him.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Echoes

**Author's Note:**

> HEAVY ANGST WARNING. I mean it. I cried writing this thing, I cried proofreading it, and I'm crying as I type this. This goddamn game is gonna be the death of me, and this fic might be the death of your good mood if you're not looking to have your heart ripped out and stomped on.
> 
> I'm only marginally sorry.

Nothing made sense anymore.

Within a few months of Cole's promotion to Homicide, Marie had grown rather accustomed to seeing her husband's face splashed across the headlines. It happened so many times that it was an unavoidable phenomenon. Whenever she took the girls to the grocery store, no less than ten people would at least say hello, if not stop her outright to thank her for her husband's work. She hadn't done a thing for the LAPD except press her husband's work-issued uniform. Why were they thanking her? The knowing smiles, the little nods, the whispers of “oh, he's such a good cop and his family looks so wonderful”, none of it made any sense to Marie. Cole was the one who risked his life, put in all the legwork, spent days on end sleeping in his car while tracking a suspect.

All the attention made her feel like some sort of odd celebrity. She apparently had status among the citizens of Los Angeles, simply for marrying the right man. And deep down, in some corner of herself long buried by a mother who raised her properly, she liked it. She liked having the community validate the absence of her husband when he worked. It made the days he'd spend gone and all the questions their girls asked worth it. As long as he was doing the right thing, making his community safer, she couldn't complain about the long work hours. The girls missed their daddy, sure, but they understood. Work was important. Work was keeping people safe. One day, if they worked hard, they could be important like daddy too. Marie took it all in stride, promotion after promotion, night after night spent with an empty bed, and steadied the loneliness and worry with a happy little bubble of pride in her chest. She knew Cole was making a difference. He was such a hard working man. A job short of back-breaking would have bored him to tears. He needed his job like the force seemed to need him.

And she loved him for it. His sense of conviction was nothing like anything she'd ever seen before. It was one of the major reasons she married him and bared his children in the first place.

When the news of Cole's... extra night work came to light, the attention turned from complimentary to consoling before Marie could even process what was happening. People's opinions seemed to change as fast as the headlines – one day they were a paragon of family life and worthy of putting ona pedestal, the next the whole city seemed to be spitting on Cole and worrying for the family he “abandoned”. Her angry outburst on the porch of their house had been the chatter of the block for weeks. All everyone seemed to want to talk about was the sight of the once-great Cole Phelps, the savior of Los Angeles, the LAPD's shining golden boy, begging his distraught wife to not throw his suitcase across the front lawn.

The people who'd once been so eager to compliment her husband and their family were the ones who now gave her sad little glances, the wives leaning into their husbands to mutter behind a hand with baleful glances toward her like she was some waif begging for a copper on the sidewalk. Marie was not a prideful woman. She didn't need their condolences. What she really needed was for the entirety of Los Angeles to not treat her marriage like it was some sort of soap opera.

It didn't matter anymore. Cole was dead, the city had already found someone else to plaster across the papers, and Marie Phelps was just another angry, heartbroken widow in a cold, bustling city that had completely forgotten about her and the tattered remains of her family.

She sat at her dining room table while a light rain pattered against the windows to her right, a lit cigarette perched between her delicate fingers where it smoldered, untouched for several long minutes. Marie watched the rain streak heavier and heavier across the window in pensive silence as the ash on her cigarette grew longer and longer, stirred only by the slow moving fan above her on the kitchen ceiling. Her free hand propped her chin up, where the soft blue silk of her blouse caught the shifting shadows and sparkles of streaked rainfall. She ashed her cigarette in a crystal ashtray on the table, then ran her fingers flat over the smooth sleeve of her top. This one had been Cole's favorite. When she'd worn it for the first time, Cole had spent the entire dinner party running a hand down her back to feel the fabric as it shifted over her spine.

She allowed a faint smile to cross her features. That had been a wonderful night. Dancing until one in the morning, laughing with their friends in celebrating of a promising new job, Cole accidentally getting a little too tipsy on scotch and grinning down at her lopsidedly like he'd never seen something so beautiful. Marie still flushed a tiny bit when she thought about it.

She loved that smile so much. Back then, Cole looked at her and saw the entire world. If asked, Marie would have said the exact same thing about the man she loved. He was her world. Cole and their girls were the only things in the world she truly cared about.

She raised her cigarette and took a slow drag. The cherry flared a vivid red-orange, letting out a steady, thin stream of smoke as it burned down before Marie's exhale plumed through the stream and dissipated it. She'd never allowed anyone to smoke in the house. The smell drove her nuts, but after three days of rain and zero motivation to stand on the covered front porch she'd caved in and found their old ashtray.

The thing was nearly full with a pack and a half's worth of Valor filters. She looked over the logo printed on one that was stuck up near the top and snorted derisively. Cole had been so proud the day he found those crates of cigarettes. He was hailed as a hero by everyone in the department and every one of their neighbors when the story hit the papers. As soon as she finished her current smoke, Marie rose from her chair and dumped the crystal dish into a trashcan. She wasn't about to get visibly upset over a logo on a damn cigarette. She wasn't.

She turned her head toward the hallway that led though the house. The girls were quiet, like they'd been ever since the funeral. The only noise that echoed down the hallway was the faint scratch of a pencil on paper and the soft pitter-patter of rain hitting the window at the end of the hall. One of them was writing in their diary, no doubt. Marie had chanced a look at one of their diaries when the girls were at school one day. She'd never make that mistake again, not after sobbing herself nearly dry over it.

“I miss daddy. So does Elaine. Mommy is sad like us. We want daddy back. We don't care if he did a bad thing. He's our daddy and he belongs here.” She'd never forget those messily printed words as long as she lived.

She let out a ragged sigh and hastily wiped at a sudden line of tears that welled under her eyes. Going a day without getting emotional seemed to be too difficult for her. The girls never saw it, though; Marie was a professional about keeping her composure until she could get behind a closed door. If walls could talk, her bedroom would tell a rather depressing and pathetic story of a woman who went from irritated to scorned to heartbroken in the space of a month, and who couldn't seem to get over whatever was bothering her.

As she sucked down a broken noise, a faint rumble of thunder outside effectively covered the sniffle. If she let herself think on it too much, her chest tended to tighten up and it got hard to breathe. And if she wasn't in her right mind, she couldn't focus on making dinner or getting the girls through the rest of their day. She couldn't break, not yet. When the girls were asleep and the house was locked, and Marie was curled in her too big, too empty bed with one of Cole's old Army shirts clutched to her chest to muffle the desperate noises that streamed from her like a broken spigot, then she could break. No matter how angry she was at the time, it didn't matter now. They'd always been good about keeping their fights to themselves and away from the girls. That wasn't about to change, just because half of the equation was gone.

Gone. It still didn't seem like he really was, and yet his folded flag still sat on her mantle, perched under a picture of him in his Army uniform looking so much younger than he had when he died. Looking between the picture and the flag, it was difficult to tell they were related to the same person. Marie hovered in her kitchen, staring out into the living room where Cole looked down on the scene with a stern, focused face. The memory of herself hanging the picture up flashed past her mind's eye: her slightly heavier than normal stomach bumping the mantle as she reached, Cole sitting on couch behind her with a tiny, swaddled Elaine in his arms nursing a bottle he held between his fingers, asking her if she needed help every five seconds like the worry wart he was. She looked to the couch where it sat in the same spot and lost an attempt at choking down a sob. Her hands clasped over her mouth to stymie another noise while her eyes slipped shut, a tear rolling down each cheek while she desperately struggled to rein in the fiery ache that was burning its way through her chest.

She loved him. Through all the things they'd fought about an all the nights she'd spent alone and her blackout anger upon realizing what he'd been doing behind her back, she loved him more fiercely than a wildfire loves a summer breeze. She loved him so much, the nights he'd spent with someone else seemed like a small irritation compared to never having him home again at all. For all she'd feared when he went away to Okinawa, she would have never guessed her greatest fear would come true in the form of a flooded drainpipe. With a shaky breath she let herself kneel on the kitchen floor, her broken sobs muffled by cupped hands she had pressed to her face while she bent over her thighs and quietly wept into the linoleum.

She loved him. Even with only his memory and the picture on the mantle to remind her of the man she'd dedicated herself to, even after all the things he'd done and how distant he'd gotten, she loved him. Nothing short of her own death was ever going to change that... or lift the crushing weight on her chest that never seemed to let her take in a full breath.

“Please come home. Please, Cole.” She murmured into her hands, careful to keep the noise quiet enough that the girls couldn't hear. “We need you. I need you. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm so sorry, Cole.”


End file.
